Poverty and Social Progress

Poverty and Social Progress

Poverty and Social Progress

Excerpt

A scientific study of poverty shows how fatuous are most of the measures whose familiar shibboleths are philanthropy, social service, moral reform, and religion. An effective program for the prevention of poverty cannot be devised and carried out until an intensive and accurate analysis of the manifold causes of poverty has been made. Such a study requires an extensive knowledge of human nature and social organization. It is obviously impossible to make an exhaustive study within the limits of one book. But I have endeavored to give a comprehensive survey of the problems of poverty which shows the one-sided character of many of the explanations of its causation and which will at least furnish the starting point for an effective program of prevention.

Chapters III-V, inclusive, discuss the biological factors in the causation of poverty. Readers not interested in this aspect of the subject may omit these chapters and yet not be seriously inconvenienced in reading the remainder of the book.

While all of the important causes of poverty are discussed, it goes without saying that the outstanding ones are the economic factors, since poverty is primarily an economic condition. Consequently the discussion centers in the main around the two fundamental economic problems, namely, those of the production and the distribution of wealth.

This book should be useful to many persons who are interested in these important social questions. It furnishes data of great value for the solution of many of the problems of citizenship and statesmanship. It is also suitable for use as a textbook for college and university courses on charities, poverty, pauperism, dependency, social pathology, etc. It will give the student an insight into the nature and causes of these great social evils and will furnish a basis for a more detailed study of special topics within this field.